Posts Tagged ‘defects’

The human visual / perceptual system works less well than we think it does. We believe that we observe everything in our field of vision, but in reality our limited processing power means that we only really process and thus see what we are paying attention to. We become blind to everything else. This phenomenon […]

To fix defects or not fix defects, that is the question: whether it is better to suffer the complaints of outraged users, or to divert effort to investigate and eliminate them. Shakespeare quotes aside, every software development project has to make decisions on how many defects to fix and which ones to leave alone prior […]

I have recently observed myself and others having a variety of reactions when defects are found ranging between the extremes of elation and despair. How should we feel when defects are discovered? Should this vary by role? Role-Based Attitudes I will first answer this question on a role by role basis, starting with the role […]

Is it possible to predict how many defects will be encountered in acceptance test or production? What number of defects would be considered reasonable versus signs of low or high quality? These are questions I considered when my last project entered acceptance test. At the time I had no good answers. So over the past […]

I have written numerous times about defect elimination practices such as code reviews, unit testing, and static code analysis tools. From the perspective of lean thinking, however, eliminating defects, no matter how soon after they are introduced, results in waste due to rework to fix the defects. The ideal as far as lean is concerned […]

If the goal of software development is to produce working software then developers need to know more than just how to code – they need to know how to prevent or eliminate functional and non-functional defects. Too many developers think their job is complete once a feature has been coded. Sometimes they think that it […]

Build automation has been the theme of my recent learning activities, so when I came across multiple positive references to a tool called FindBugs I decided to give it a try. My conclusion: FindBugs is worth using on all Java projects. Read below for the details. FindBugs is a Java static analysis tool that scans […]

If you are a software developer and have not maintained operational applications with real users hammering away at it, then you are missing some important lessons. You might not fully appreciate the operational challenges facing the maintenance and support team, particularly when the software in question is suffering in the areas of reliability, performance, or […]

This article is a continuation of my previous article on how to do root cause analysis . As I promised, this article provides examples of root cause analysis being performed. A famous example of root cause analysis is the presidential commission’s inquiry into the 1986 US Challenger space shuttle explosion, particularly the observations of Nobel […]

Root cause analysis is an important activity whenever a problem occurs – whether it is a defect, an operational outage, or something else. Whatever the problem, your objective should be to not only resolve the issue but also prevent it from reoccurring in the future. To do this, you need to determine the root cause […]

What’s your process for fixing a defect? What do you do when you are informed that a feature you developed isn’t working to the users’ satisfaction, or even worse fails to work at all? Here’s what I do. Initial investigation. My goal is to reproduce the reported problem in the application in my development environment. […]